To set down, as legible characters; to form the
conveyance of meaning; to inscribe on any material by a suitable
instrument; as, to write the characters called letters; to write
figures. [1913 Webster]

To set down for reading; to express in legible or
intelligible characters; to inscribe; as, to write a deed; to write
a bill of divorcement; hence, specifically, to set down in an
epistle; to communicate by letter. [1913 Webster] Last night she
enjoined me to write some lines to one she loves. --Shak. [1913
Webster] I chose to write the thing I durst not speak To her I
loved. --Prior. [1913 Webster]

Hence, to compose or produce, as an author. [1913
Webster] I purpose to write the history of England from the
accession of King James the Second down to a time within the memory
of men still living. --Macaulay. [1913 Webster]

To impress durably; to imprint; to engrave; as,
truth written on the heart. [1913 Webster]

To make known by writing; to record; to prove by
one's own written testimony; -- often used reflexively. [1913
Webster] He who writes himself by his own inscription is like an
ill painter, who, by writing on a shapeless picture which he hath
drawn, is fain to tell passengers what shape it is, which else no
man could imagine. --Milton. [1913 Webster] To write
to, to communicate by a written document to. Written
laws, laws deriving their force from express legislative
enactment, as contradistinguished from unwritten, or common, law.
See the Note under Law, and
Common
law, under Common, a.
[1913 Webster]

Writing began as a consequence of the burgeoning
needs of accounting. Around the 4th millennium BC, the complexity
of trade and administration outgrew the power of memory, and
writing became a more dependable method of recording and presenting
transactions in a permanent form (Robinson, 2003, p. 36).

Writing as a category

Writing, more particularly, refers to
two things: writing as a noun, the thing that is written;
and writing as a verb,
which designates the activity of writing. It refers to the inscription of characters on a
medium, thereby forming words,
and larger units of language, known as texts. It
also refers to the creation of meaning and the information thereby
generated. In that regard, linguistics (and related
sciences) distinguishes
between the written
language and the spoken
language. The significance of the medium by which meaning and
information is conveyed is indicated by the distinction made in the
arts and sciences. For example, while public
speaking and poetry
reading are both types of speech,
the former is governed by the rules of rhetoric and the latter by
poetics.

Writing is also a distinctly human activity. It has been said
that a monkey, randomly
typing away on a typewriter (in the days when
typewriters replaced the pen
or
plume as the preferred instrument of writing) could re-create
Shakespeare--
but only if it lived long enough (this is known as the infinite
monkey theorem). Such writing has been speculatively designated
as coincidental. It
is also speculated that extra-terrestrial
beings exist who may possess knowledge of writing. The fact is that
the only known writing is human writing.

Means for recording information

Wells argues that writing has the ability to "put
agreements, laws, commandments on record. It made the growth of
states larger than the old city states possible. The command of the
priest or king and his seal could go far beyond his sight and voice
and could survive his death" (Wells in Robinson, 2003, p.
35).

Writing systems

The major writing
systems – methods of inscription – broadly fall into four
categories: logographic, syllabic, alphabetic, and featural.
Another category, ideographic (symbols for
ideas), has never been developed sufficiently to represent
language. A sixth category, pictographic, is
insufficient to represent language on its own, but often forms the
core of logographies.

Logographies

A logogram is a written character
which represents a word or morpheme. The vast number of
logograms needed to write language, and the many years required to
learn them, are the major disadvantage of the logographic systems
over alphabetic systems. However, the efficiency of reading
logographic writing once it is learned is a major advantage. No
writing system is wholly logographic: all have phonetic components
as well as logograms ("logosyllabic" components in the case of
Chinese
characters, cuneiform, and Mayan, where
a glyph may stand for a morpheme, a syllable, or both;
"logoconsonantal" in the case of hieroglyphs), and many have an
ideographic component (Chinese "radicals", hieroglyphic
"determiners"). For example, in Mayan, the glyph for "fin",
pronounced "ka'", was also used to represent the syllable "ka"
whenever the pronunciation of a logogram needed to be indicated, or
when there was no logogram. In Chinese, about 90% of characters are
compounds of a semantic (meaning) element called a radical with an
existing character to indicate the pronunciation, called a
phonetic. However, such phonetic elements complement the
logographic elements, rather than vice versa.

The main logographic system in use today is
Chinese characters, used with some modification for various
languages of China, Japanese, and, to a lesser extent, Korean in
South Korea. Another is the classical Yi
script.

Syllabaries

A syllabary is a set of written
symbols that represent (or approximate) syllables. A glyph in a
syllabary typically represents a consonant followed by a vowel, or
just a vowel alone, though in some scripts more complex syllables
(such as consonant-vowel-consonant, or consonant-consonant-vowel)
may have dedicated glyphs. Phonetically related syllables are not
so indicated in the script. For instance, the syllable "ka" may
look nothing like the syllable "ki", nor will syllables with the
same vowels be similar.

Syllabaries are best suited to languages with
relatively simple syllable structure, such as Japanese. Other
languages that use syllabic writing include the Linear B script
for Mycenaean
Greek; Cherokee; Ndjuka, an
English-based creole
language of Surinam; and the
Vai
script of Liberia. Most
logographic systems have a strong syllabic component. Ethiopic,
though technically an alphabet, has fused consonants and vowels
together to the point that it's learned as if it were a
syllabary.

Alphabets

An alphabet is a small set of
symbols, each of which roughly represents or historically
represented a phoneme of the language. In a perfectly phonological alphabet, the
phonemes and letters would correspond perfectly in two directions:
a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its
pronunciation, and a speaker could predict the pronunciation of a
word given its spelling. As languages often evolve independently of
their writing systems, and writing systems have been borrowed for
languages they were not designed for, the degree to which letters
of an alphabet correspond to phonemes of a language varies greatly
from one language to another and even within a single
language.

In most of the alphabets of the Mid-East, only
consonants are indicated, or vowels may be indicated with optional
diacritics. Such systems are called abjads. In most of the alphabets
of India and Southeast Asia, vowels are indicated through
diacritics or modification of the shape of the consonant. These are
called abugidas. Some
abugidas, such as Ethiopic and
Cree, are learned by children as syllabaries, and so are often
called "syllabics". However, unlike true syllabaries, there is not
an independent glyph for each syllable.

Sometimes the term "alphabet" is restricted to
systems with separate letters for consonants and vowels, such as
the Latin
alphabet. Because of this use, Greek is
often considered to be the first alphabet.

Featural scripts

A featural script notates the building
blocks of the phonemes that make up a language. For instance, all
sounds pronounced with the lips ("labial" sounds) may have some
element in common. In the Latin alphabet, this is accidentally the
case with the letters "b" and "p"; however, labial "m" is
completely dissimilar, and the similar-looking "q" is not labial.
In Korean hangul,
however, all four labial consonants are based on the same basic
element. However, in practice, Korean is learned by children as an
ordinary alphabet, and the featural elements tend to pass
unnoticed.

Another featural script is SignWriting,
the most popular writing system for many sign
languages, where the shapes and movements of the hands and face
are represented iconically. Featural scripts are also common in
fictional or invented systems, such as Tolkien'sTengwar.

Historical significance of writing systems

Historians draw a distinction between prehistory
and history, with history defined by the advent of writing. The
cave paintings and petroglyphs of prehistoric peoples can be
considered precursors of writing, but are not considered writing
because they did not represent language directly.

Writing systems always develop and change based
on the needs of the people who use them. Sometimes the shape,
orientation and meaning of individual signs also changes over time.
By tracing the development of a script it is possible to learn
about the needs of the people who used the script as well as how it
changed over time.

History of early writing

By definition, history begins with written
records; evidence of human culture without writing is the realm of
prehistory.

The evolution of writing was a process involving
economic necessity in the ancient near east. Archaeologist Denise
Schmandt-Besserat determined the link between previously
uncategorized clay "tokens" and the first known writing, cuneiform. The clay tokens
were used to represent commodities, and perhaps even units of
time spent in labor, and their number and type
became more complex as civilization advanced. A degree of
complexity was reached when over a hundred different kinds of
tokens had to be accounted for, and tokens were wrapped and fired
in clay, with markings to indicate the kind of tokens inside. These
markings soon replaced the tokens themselves, and the clay
envelopes were demonstrably the prototype for clay writing tablets.
this had evolved into using a triangular-shaped stylus pressed into
soft clay for recording numbers. This was gradually augmented with
pictographic writing using a sharp stylus to indicate what was
being counted. Round-stylus and sharp-stylus writing was gradually
replaced by writing using a wedge-shaped stylus (hence the term
cuneiform),
at first only for logograms, but evolved to
include phonetic elements by the 29th century BC. Around the 26th
century BC, cuneiform began to represent syllables of spoken
Sumerian.
Also in that period, cuneiform writing became a general purpose
writing system for logograms, syllables, and numbers, and this
script was adapted to another Mesopotamian language, Akkadian,
and from there to others such as Hurrian,
and Hittite.
Scripts similar in appearance to this writing system include those
for Ugaritic
and Old
Persian.

Turkmenistan

An unknown civilization in Central Asia 4,000
years ago, hundreds of years before Chinese writing developed. An
excavation near Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, revealed an
inscription on a piece of stone that was used as a stamp
seal.

China

In China historians have
found out a lot about the early Chinese dynasties from the written
documents left behind. From the Shang
Dynasty most of this writing has survived on bones or bronze
implements. Markings on turtleshells have
been carbon-dated to around 1500 BC. Historians have found that the
type of media used
had an effect on what the writing was documenting and how it was
used.

There have recently been discoveries of
tortoise-shell carvings dating back to c. 6000 BC, but whether or
not the carvings are of sufficient complexity to qualify as writing
is under debate. If it is deemed to be a written language, writing
in China will predate Mesopotamian cuneiform, long acknowledged as
the first appearance of writing, by some 2000 years.

Egypt

The earliest known hieroglyphic
inscriptions are the Narmer
Palette, dating to c.3200 BC, and several recent discoveries
that may be slightly older, though the glyphs were based on a much
older artistic tradition. The hieroglyphic script was logographic with phonetic
adjuncts that included an effective alphabet.

Writing was very important in maintaining the
Egyptian empire, and literacy was concentrated among an educated
elite of scribes. Only
people from certain backgrounds were allowed to train to become
scribes, in the service of temple, pharaonic, and military
authorities. The hieroglyph system was always difficult to learn,
but in later centuries was purposely made even more so, as this
preserved the scribes' status.

The Tifinagh script
(Berber languages) is descended from the Libyco-Berber script which
is assumed to be of Phoenician origin.

Mesoamerica

A stone slab with 3,000-year-old writing was
discovered in the Mexican state of Veracruz, and is an example of
the oldest script in the Western Hemisphere preceding the oldest
Zapotec
writing dated to about 500 BC.

Of several pre-Colombian
scripts in Mesoamerica,
the one that appears to have been best developed, and the only one
to be deciphered, is the Maya script.
The earliest inscriptions which are identifiably Maya date to the
3rd century BC, and writing was in continuous use until shortly
after the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century
AD. Maya writing used logograms complemented by a set of syllabic
glyphs, somewhat similar in function to modern Japanese
writing.

Creation of text or information

Creativity

Author

Writer

Critiques

Writers sometimes search out others to evaluate
or criticize their work. To this end, many writers join writing
circles, often found at local libraries or
bookstores. With the
evolution of the Internet, writing
circles have started to go online.